Psychologists and the war: the meaning of intelligene in the alpha and beta tests.

Abstract

“Great will be our good fortune,” Robert Yerkes, head of the U. S. Army psychology team, wrote, “if the lesson in human engineering which the war has taught is carried over directly and effectively into our civil institutions and activities.” For psychology and the schools the great experiment of World War I was the construction and standardization of the Alpha and Beta group intelligence test as a technique for differentiating men within disciplined and highly stratified social organizations. The dream shared by psychologists, social reformers, and educators of the time was the creation of an efficiently organized society by the proper allocation of manpower resources. The individual I.Q. test was impractical to use with large numbers of the American population to determine proper occupational niches. Mass testing with a group I.Q. test, it was believed, made human engineering feasible. Efficiency in the human group, claimed army test developer, H. H. Goddard, in a 1920 lecture, “is not so much a question of the absolute numbers of persons of high and low intelligence as it is whether each grade of intelligence is assigned a part, in the whole organization, that is within its capacity.” Goddard went on to suggest that man could learn from the busy bee “the perfect organization of the hive.” “Perhaps,” Goddard stated, “it would be wiser for us to emulate the bee's social organization more and his supposed industry less.”

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